No doubt every girl would meet her obligations squarely if she realized what was the underlying significance of the freshman year; the school life would surely be approached with a conscientious purpose.  What a girl gets in school will much depend upon what she has to give.  No girl is there simply to have a good time or merely to learn things out of books.  Nor is she there to fill in the interim between childhood and young womanhood, when one will go into society, another marry, and a third take up some wage-earning career.  No, she is there to carry life forward in the deepest, truest sense; and the longer she can have to get an education and to make the best of the opportunities of school and college life, the richer and fuller her after-years will be.  Both middle life and old age will be deeper and stronger.  Let us think about these girls, let us think about what it means to be a freshman, and so lessen our difficulties and increase our pleasures; let us have a big conception,—­a large ideal always at heart—­of what the first year should be, and beginning well we shall be the more likely to end well.

II

THE GIRL AND THE SCHOOL

Inside school or college the girl is in several ways responsible for the atmosphere.  Merely in her conversation she can be of service or dis-service.  It may be simply a good joke which she is telling, but if the joke misrepresents the school she will, perhaps, do lasting harm.  If she is hypercritical—­and there is nothing so contagious as criticism—­she influences people in the direction of her thought; she sets a current of criticism in motion.  A student frequently gives vent to an opinion that is only half-baked—­it is well, by the way, to make zwieback of all our opinions before we pass them around as edible—­about courses and instructors.  She does not realize that some opinions to be worth anything must be the result of a long process of baking, that a nibble from the corner of a four months’ or nine months’ course will not, however understandingly it may be Fletcherized, tell you whether the course is going to be fruit cake, meringue or common soda crackers.  She may think that she herself is so unimportant that what she says can’t matter, or she may not mean what she says and be merely letting off steam.  Nevertheless her influence is exerted.  Some one showed an old lady, who had never been known to say anything in the least critical of any human being, the picture of a very fat man prominent in public life.  She looked at it a moment, and then said sweetly:  “My, isn’t he plump!” If only there were more old and young ladies like that dear soul!